Most marketing reports are long, colourful and useless. Impressions, reach, likes and follower counts fill the slides, the numbers go up, and at the end nobody can answer the only question that matters: should we change anything?
The test of a real metric
A decision metric changes what you do next. If a number can rise or fall without anyone altering budget, message or priority, it is decoration. Impressions are decoration. Cost per qualified inquiry is a decision metric.
The five questions a monthly report should answer
- How many qualified inquiries did marketing generate, and from which channels?
- What did each inquiry cost, by channel, and how is that trending?
- What revenue closed from marketing-sourced inquiries?
- What did we test this month, and what did we learn?
- What are we changing next month because of the above?
If a report answers these five questions on one page, it is doing its job. Everything else is appendix.
Why agencies default to vanity
Vanity metrics always go up, and numbers that always go up are easy to present. Demand better: tie reporting to inquiries and revenue, segment by source and language, and insist on the fifth question every month. A report without a resulting decision is a receipt, not a report.
Marketing earns its seat at the executive table by speaking the language of the table: customers, costs and revenue.